“My own contribution to outreach probably received more recognition than it deserved because others were due most of the credit for our success. Nevertheless, in 1989, I received a University Extension Certificate of Merit. That same year, the Alabama Humanities Foundation (AHF) asked me to write a piece to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary, centering on the work of AHF in strengthening community life through public programming. Despite a variety of deadlines, I agreed. “Habits of the Heart in the Heart of Dixie” was my attempt to place AHF’s outreach effort into broad social context.

Rural and small town migration patterns, urban complexity, and the atomization of American life threatened venerable traditions of community life. Books as divergent as The Different Drum:  Community Making and Peace by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck and Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Community in American Life by Robert N. Bellah and others had placed the issue front and center on the nation’s agenda.

The age of air conditioners, the disappearance of front porches, the decline of church revivals, and the vanishing court and market days were locking us into progressively smaller cubicles, rooms, offices, and other stifling spaces, largely away from one another. Folks no longer learned so easily about the needs of others. Modern society might produce less small town gossip and petty intrigue. But it most certainly contained less neighborliness and willingness to be bothered by someone else’s troubles. This pulling away from community, this decreasing ability to connect meaningfully, to share important common symbols, had fractured and weakened social relationships and communal identity.

Rebuilding a sense of community is no easy matter. It first requires explaining what it means to be human. Such definitions emerge from religion, philosophy, literature, music, art, drama, speech, and history. This public redefinition requires that practitioners of the humanities occasionally take leave of their classrooms, where many of their seeds fall on the hard, sterile ground of career-building and degree-chasing anyway (or sometimes on adolescents not even that serious). We have to engage the community of adults who do not take our importance for granted. The larger community is not so much hostile to us as it is preoccupied with more urgent concerns: earning a living; nurturing families; preserving neighborhoods; coping with divorce, sickness, and death. Ordinary people do not perceive that humanists (a term they generally don’t understand anyway) have much to contribute to their prosaic comings and goings, their quality of life, or the stability of the places where they live. Nor do we make much effort to persuade them of our relevance. Our efforts in AHF, Auburn’s History and Heritage Festivals, Reading Alabama, and other Humanities Center programs had been but halting first steps at opening that dialogue.”

How has humanities programming touched your life?

General Krulak served 35 years in the U.S. Marine Corps. His last position was as Commandant of the Marine Corps and as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He commanded a platoon and two rifle companies during two tours of duty in Vietnam and then held a variety of command and staff positions. These included deputy director of the White House Military Office, Commanding General, 6th Marine Expeditionary Brigade during Desert Storm, Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command, and Commanding General, Marine Forces Pacific. During his military service, General Krulak was awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star Medal, the Bronze Star Medal with Combat “V” and two gold stars, the Purple Heart with gold star, the Meritorious Service Medal, the French Legion d’Honneur Commandeur rank, and many other decorations and medals.

Upon his retirement from the Marine Corps, General Krulak joined MBNA America Bank as Vice Chairman and Chief Administrative Officer and subsequently as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MBNA Europe Bank, Ltd. After four years in this position, he returned to the United States and served as Vice Chairman, MBNA America Bank as Head of Corporate Development, Mergers and Acquisitions. General Krulak retired from MBNA in June 2005.

Today, General Krulak is the President for Birmingham-Southern College, a liberal arts college located in Birmingham. In addition, General Krulak currently sits on the Board of Directors of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Corporation where he is a member of the Public Policy and Personnel Committees and the Board of Directors of Union Pacific Railroad Corporation where he is a member of the Finance and Audit Committees. He sits on the Board of Regents forthe Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. He sits on the Board of the CEO Forum and serves as Director with Aston Villa Football Club in the United Kingdom. He is an advisor to the Center for Naval Analysis and Human Rights First. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

General Krulak is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and has a master’s degree in labor relations from George Washington University.

Join us on Sept. 26 to hear this accomplished man speak, and to congratulate this year’s award winners:

• Elaine Hughes, recipient of the 2011 Alabama Humanities Award
• Wells Fargo, recipient of the 2011 Charitable Organization in the Humanities

To order tickets and for more details, please click here.

By Cynthia Martin, AHF Programs and Development Assistant

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”  Confucius

I recently took a journey of over 7,000 miles that began as I stepped over to the computer and signed onto Facebook. His name was “Brother Rama” and he was from India. He graduated from a college in the United States with several of my friends. They all spoke very highly of him and his ministry to people with HIV/AIDS in India. Still, I was totally unprepared for what occurred when I befriended him on Facebook and viewed his pictures for the first time. The precious people in those pictures reached out and grabbed my heart. For me, they could not remain nameless faces in some far away land. I had to know their names, I had to go there, and I had to meet them.

As my friend and I were preparing to go to India, the plans went slightly awry due to her job. Instead of the two of us traveling together for the entire duration of the trip, I was going alone for one week prior to her arrival. I had never gone to a foreign country before, especially not alone. (Well, visiting Mexico with a large youth group in the 1980s doesn’t count.) A somewhat apprehensive lady stepped on a plane in Birmingham headed all alone to India. A confident, although suffering from jet-lag and slightly sick, lady stepped off a plane at the same airport three weeks later.

It was a journey unlike one I had ever experienced before. It wasn’t just traveling on an airplane to a foreign land. It opened up new opportunities in other areas of my life as well. Many people have suggested I write a book about my life history. I felt so inadequate in my writing skills that I had not done it. I decided to “test” my writing abilities by starting a blog to keep others informed of my trip to India. It was adeptly entitled, “The Journey.” I made new friends from all over the world that stumbled upon my blog and contacted me. My confidence in my writing skills have soared somewhat and I am seriously considering writing that book.

Upon my arrival home, I stepped over to the computer to begin writing the stories of those precious people I had met and how they arrived at Happiness Home, the shelter for people with HIV/AIDS. Not only did I meet them and see their faces, I now knew their names and was tasked with writing their personal journey stories.

By Bob Stewart, AHF executive director

Compared to railroads, riverboats and covered wagons, hitchhiking doesn’t hold a lofty place in America’s transportation history. But there’s no doubt of its place in popular culture. Think of Jack Kerouac (On the Road), John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath), and Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions), to name just three writers who have included hitchhiking in their classic works. Science fiction writers have even described interstellar hitchhiking (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and inter-dimensional hitchhiking (Robert Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice). Add to these literary works the many references to hitchhiking in music and film, and it’s safe to say that the lone traveler thumbing a ride on an interstate ramp or a dusty two-lane highway will remain an icon of the American imagination.

Fortunately for my generation, the golden age of hitchhiking on a mass scale occurred when some of us needed it most—the 1960s and early 1970s. Not that we were penniless or homeless. But in much of the country, hitchhiking was simply an accepted mode of travel without having to invest in a personal vehicle. Until I bought my first car in 1974, I relied on the outstretched thumb for a good part of my travels and transportation during my first two years of college. In the Five College area of Massachusetts (Amherst-Hampshire-Mount Holyoke-Smith-UMass), a reliable, free bus system allowed you to easily move around from campus to campus for classes, parties, etc. But the area was also filled with students and “townies” offering equally reliable, free—and safe—rides for the asking. You could stand outside my fraternity house on Route 9 and catch a lift to virtually any local community, and even farther destinations such as New York and Boston, as quickly as you could catch a bus. So everybody hitched, even women.

Some of my most memorable hitchhikes included:
• A series of rides with my fellow Alabamian, Rik Williams, to the White Mountains in northern New Hampshire during our first Thanksgiving break. One ride was in the back of a pickup during a driving snowfall.
• Standing alone with my thumb out on I-95 in the notorious South Bronx area of NYC. That I jumped into the cab of a semi shows how desperate I was to get off that stretch of highway.
• A college chum and I being picked up on the Bessemer Superhighway by another friend’s mother and sister after hitchhiking from Nashville (having already bummed a nonstop ride from Massachusetts to the Music City). They were so shocked to see us on the side of the road that they actually stopped and took us to Tuscaloosa! We were undoubtedly the first and last hitchhikers that either of them ever picked up!

After I acquired my own automobile, I regularly returned the favor by picking up hitchhikers myself. I even gave a ride to three total strangers from Boston to San Francisco—and back for another one.

There must be an “invincibility delusion” gene among 21-year-old males, which leads them to not think twice about catching a ride from a bearded guy in a baseball cap driving a Peterbilt—or eagerly stopping for him when he’s the one with his thumb out. That gene became dormant in the late 1970s after a few well-publicized killings of and by hitchhikers. Young male and female hitchhikers finally bought cars, got married and began raising children for whom hitchhiking was absolutely verboten—even if it meant buying them their own cars. (Perhaps the invincibility delusion gene has reemerged in recent years with the explosion of extreme sports.)

According to British sociologists Graeme Chesters and David Smith in a 2001 paper, “The Neglected Art of Hitch-hiking: Risk, Trust and Sustainability,” (http://www.socresonline.org.uk/6/3/chesters.html), hitchhiking isn’t likely to return on a widespread scale, despite nostalgia, charity, and young people’s passion for adventure and the environment. Most folks view the risk as too high, and they have a greater variety of transportation options anyway. Those occasional souls on the side of the road with a handmade sign reading “New Orleans” or “need food and a ride” aren’t your father’s hitchhikers. Give them a couple of dollars, but let them catch a lift with another Good Samaritan besides you. Nor would I advise hitchhiking as an efficient method of, say, getting to that important business meeting in Atlanta. Amtrak—or even a bicycle—might be faster.

By Amelia Barton Trowbridge, born in Birmingham, Ala., July 24, 1945

As a young child, I always had what some of my family referred to as a wanderlust. One of my favorite cousins told me when I came back to Union Chapel, Alabama, in this new millennium that when I started walking, I starting running and would sometimes just run down the dirt road. I loved reading biographies growing up such as The Life of Madame Curie, Babe Ruth, Babe Diedrickson and Amelia Earhart with dreams that I would be able to experience many areas of the world in both travel and work.

When I finished Walker High School in 1963, I was excited to go to Auburn University and experience another part of the world. From there, I was able to experience many parts of the world. I worked as an economic analyst for Urban Consultants, an Urban Renewal Firm in Montgomery, doing projects all across the South. From there my journey took me to Birmingham, working as an assistant buyer at Blach’s, a high-end department store. After less than a year, I found myself in Atlanta like many young people in the late 60s, early 70s. During that time, Atlanta was starting its rise to become one of the major cities in the world. And it was during this time that my life journeys started to expand more than I ever dreamed.

My real estate career took me to a convention in California where I met my present husband, Chuck, who lived in Denver. I moved from Atlanta to Denver in January of 1981. Denver was an exciting and rapidly growing city at this time. My husband’s speaking engagements and work took us to many cities and states. There are only three states that I have not visited! I’ve mastered subways in many cities including New York, Paris and Tokyo, which was a journey in itself. In 1989 we were fortunate to move to Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, an area I loved and thought would be my final home. In some ways this area was a lot like the rural area of Union Chapel, Alabama, where I grew up. Some of the families had been there for many generations and were farmers and fishermen.

Unfortunately, my husband got “Island fever,” so we moved back to Colorado. After 11 years watching our grandchildren grow up, we semi-retired and moved back to Union Chapel, my family home place. I have some of the original deeds dating back to the 1800s. Not quite ready for retirement, I am now an AmeriCorps Vista Volunteer working with the Walker County Arts Alliance and the Walker County Ad-hoc Nonprofit Council. Sometime people say it is better to be a big fish in a little pond than a little fish in a big pond; I just wanted to swim in the big ocean of life. Now I am back and could not be happier living where my original roots were.

By Billie Jean Young, AHF Board member

When I started school in Pennington, Alabama, in the late fifties, we rode to school in a pickup truck every morning with Mr. Tom Bryant. He would drop us off at the elementary school and go on to deliver older kids to the high school a few miles farther up in the hills in the Indian Springs community. Our pickup truck had a body built over the back with a doorway for us to enter by stepping over the tailgate. It had a few chairs and seats back there as well. Mr. Tom Bryant could be sure we wouldn’t fall off the back and spill out on the road. We might get tossed around a bit back there, but it would mostly consist of being tossed into and against the person seated next to you. Mr. Tom Bryant knew that, at the very least, we would all be there when he arrived at the school. He would drive us to Miss Kate’s at Thompkinsville Elementary and speed on off to Indian Springs to get those high school students there on time.

Afternoons, we weren’t so lucky. When school let out at 3:00, Mr. Tom Bryant wasn’t there to pick us up to go home since he would be at Indian Springs High School picking up the high school students. As soon as school let out every day we walked the two miles home through the woods. There would usually be five or six children from two to four families walking through the woods to the road to get home. We were first-through-sixth-graders, the oldest probably being around 12. During the time I walked through those woods until we transferred to the high school, I don’t remember any kind of disturbance or fighting among us. Our single minded ambition was to make the trek home. We younger ones obeyed the older ones whether they were your siblings or not and we took their counsel if we encountered snakes or “tappin” turtles. (A tappin turtle would not let go of your finger until it thundered, so the story went, so we were cautioned to never pet one!) Deer, rabbits and squirrels got out of our way as we made our noisy way along the path. We would usually become aware of their presence as they scampered away from us and made noise rustling bushes and weeds.

On the way home there was a low place near the creek that would fill up with water if the creek rose and we would have to navigate it across a log, always a harrowing balancing act for me. I was glad to make it to Indian Springs when they sent us there in sixth grade a year early, just prior to school Freedom of Choice and eventual integration of schools. Mr. Tom Bryant had bought a yellow school bus by then. And even though he ran out of gas regularly, he still drove up to the filling station and ordered $1 or $2 worth of gas at a time and managed to sound as important and confident as if he were saying “fill ‘er up.” We would tease Mr. Tom Bryant sometimes but he seldom had to chastise anybody. He did not have any children of his own, but he was a good-natured soul, and could be depended on not to mention slight infractions to your parents. We laughed and even joked about his being too cheap to buy a tank of gas at one time, but we were glad to be riding a regular school bus. There was plenty wrong with it, but we loved it and saw it as a great improvement with its built-in seats, instead of that pickup truck with the chairs sliding around and us bumping into each other. That was before we named our “new” bus Old Death. But that is, indeed, another story for another journey.

By Paul Lawson, AHF director of development and public relations

Singer Ricky Nelson was slightly before my time but not by much. Gee, he would be 71 if he were alive today. He died tragically in a New Year’s Eve airplane crash headed to a concert in Texas. I vividly remember Ricky closing most of the old Ozzie and Harriet shows with one of his hit songs. Screaming teenage girls, of course, were included in the sound track. Looking back, I think ole Oz helped his youngest son out by using the TV series to promote Ricky’s music. Record sales shot up the next day. Mucho presto! The music video was born 25 years prior to MTV.

One of Ricky Nelson’s most popular songs, “Travelin’ Man,” fits nicely with an exciting new AHF project—“Journey Stories,” premiering in Alabama this summer. The song was written in about 20 minutes by little known writer, Jerry Fuller. His first choice was to offer it to Sam Cooke, but Sam turned it down. Ricky’s bass player, Joe Osborne, had been in the next room of the record company and heard it. He asked Cooke’s manager if he could hear it again, and the man said: “Here, you can have it.” It was one of Ricky’s biggest hits and stayed on the Billboard music charts for more than four months, including two weeks at number one.

I invite you to put “Travelin’ Man” in the CD player and listen as you journey to one of the six cultural institutions hosting “Journey Stories.” In Alabama, the six communities hosting the exhibition starting on June 25 at the Bankhead House and Heritage Center in Jasper are: Alexander City, Arab, Eufaula, Jasper, Marion and Mobile. Don’t miss out on a winner, like Sam Cooke did!

For all of the specifics on the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibition “Journey Stories,” including dates and locations, visit ahf.net/journeystories.

By Jennifer Dome, AHF public relations and publications manager

One of my earliest memories is traveling in the back seat of my parents’ station wagon from North Carolina to South Dakota where we were going to live while my father attended Air Force Officer Training School in Illinois. I always seemed to be in the back seat of a station wagon, or mini van, or some vehicle while growing up. As the daughter of an Air Force captain, such was my lot in life from age 1 through 16 when we finally made our last trek, from California to New Jersey, where my father retired.

It was on those trips, though, that I got to see a vast majority of our amazing country. From the plains of Kansas, to the mountains of Grand Teton National Park, to the snowy peaks of the Rockies, there are very few states that I haven’t at least driven through. And along the way I’ve learned a lot about our country’s history.

I was born in New Hampshire and left New England before I could walk to live in North Carolina. I only attended school through first grade there, but it was time enough to pick up my teacher, Mrs. Best’s, southern drawl and learn to say “you make me ill” for just about any reason at all. What I remember most about North Carolina is the beautiful beach, and bouncing in the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

Next up was a short stint in South Dakota where we stayed with friends, the Mortons, and got a first-hand look at the Badlands, an amazing landscape east of Rapid City where prairie dogs seemed to be the only life that existed.

When my dad finished school, our next post was Minot, North Dakota, where the snows piled high and frost bite was a scary thought to this seven-year-old. Here I traveled to water parks near the Canadian border, and the International Peace Gardens across that border. What I remember most about those trips are the fields and fields of wheat, and the rows of sunflowers, blooming and stretching their yellow faces to the hot summer sun.

We moved back to South Dakota as a family and had our first taste of living off the Air Force base, in Rapid City itself. It was there that I got my largest taste of American history: Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, the plight of the Sioux. South Dakota is a rich state, with a deep history buried in the Black Hills. I’ll always remember the sunrise Easter church service we attended at Mount Rushmore, seeing the sun come up and shine like a spotlight on those four faces.

It was during this time that we traveled to Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park, two of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited, besides Hawaii. Between Old Faithful and the mountains that rise out of Jenny Lake, I’d never seen a landscape so grand.

California was next on the map and traveling through Utah to get there was an interesting experience. I remember getting stuck in Utah for a few days because my mother was sick, and dad taking my sister and I to see “Aladdin” to pass the time. The landscape there seemed rugged, but the orange glow the sun produced as it set was stunning.

Then, California, with its wide beaches and traffic congestion and hazy, palm-tree-lined horizons, was unlike anywhere I’d ever seen. Especially because we lived far from the glitz and glamor of L.A. in the middle of the Mojave Dessert, at Edwards Air Force Base. As a middle school and high school student, it became common to be out on the base’s golf course late at night with friends, and have to stand still, in scared, hushed silence, as coyotes traipsed nearby. Witnessing shuttle landings, and hearing sonic booms, tied this place to history as the place where Chuck Yeager first broke the speed of sound.

It’s the move from California to New Jersey that I remember best, going through the Rockies and stopping in Breckenridge, Colorado, for a night. The mountains rise out of the ground and shoot straight for the sky, snow on the tops even in July. On to Texas we drove, getting my first look at the metropolis of Dallas, then on to the East Coast, where I finished high school and now call home, despite having lived in Pennsylvania, Chicago, London and now Birmingham, Alabama, since high school.

From D.C. up to my father’s hometown of Boston, the East Coast has always seemed so accessible and the opportunities to learn endless. From the Smithsonian museums to the Liberty Bell, to Wall Street and then Quincy Market, the East Coast is a fruitful trail that tells the story of our country’s birth.

I’ve been very lucky, to be raised this way and see the states I’ve seen. Sure, there were miles on the road when I propped up baby doll blankets to block out my sister and her peskiness, and no doubt we tested my parents’ patience numerous times. But now I look at the travels I took as a child and I’m thankful for the experience, thankful that I live in such a free and beautiful country where I can drive from state to state, taking in the bounty. Without the journeys I had as a child, I might not appreciate Alabama as much, with its wonderful landscapes, from the ocean in Mobile, to the mountains up north, and all the historical sites in between.

It is on a lengthy family trip to northern Minnesota in February 2010 that Daniel has the opportunity to exhibit the full extent of his prowess with geography, maps, navigation, and weather. Armed with his personal hand-held GPS, laptop computer and an array of road maps of a half-dozen states, Daniel plans and advises the two drivers every mile of the way from Birmingham to the Ontario border and back, including the weeklong stay in a remote cabin on a frozen lake. Returning home and back to his fifth-grade class, Daniel preps for the upcoming Geography Bee at his elementary school by poring over atlases after school. It is no surprise to his teachers when he wins first place for his school and subsequently represents the school system in the statewide Geography Bee, capturing third place.

Not satisfied with placing third, this budding meteorologist intensifies his study of geography over summer break, sandwiched between Boy Scouts, piano lessons, and church activities. By mid-winter of sixth grade, his email weather updates are launched with pinpointed detail, matching the accuracy of professional forecasters across Alabama. Now in his first year of middle school, he finds himself up against a more challenging field of competitors. Again, he wins first place for his school and school system. After a sudden-death shoot-out in the statewide Geography Bee at Samford University in April of this year, Daniel is now packing his bag and flexing his memory in preparation for the National Geography Bee in our nation’s capital as Alabama’s 2011 Champion. As soon as his plane touches down at Dulles Airport, we fully expect to receive an email forecasting the weather in Washington, D.C.

Glenn Dasher, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at UA-Huntsville, asked me to write an essay for the civility forum in August 2010. I agreed, even though my only professional exposure to thinking about issues of politics and morality is an introduction to ethics course I teach every semester. The theme of that course is how to use ethical theories as guides for resolving conflicting (or potentially conflicting) desires. My essay is an attempt to develop this theme on a political level, where conflicts occur among people’s different values. The basic idea for the structure of the paper comes from Plato’s Republic, where an investigation of the nature of justice leads Socrates and his interlocutors to imagine different sociopolitical structures and, ultimately, to use their conclusions about the nature of justice in a city to draw conclusions about the nature of justice in the soul, a city in microcosm. Plato’s conclusion in the Republic is that a person is just when there is harmony among the three different parts of the soul—appetite, emotion, and reason. My analysis differs from Plato’s in three important ways: first, in focusing on the nature of civility rather than the nature of justice; second, in not following Plato’s rigid division of the soul into discrete parts, each with its own distinctive function; third, in striving to accommodate the democratic spirit of honoring even priorities that are, from certain evaluative perspectives, corrupt or misguided. But, despite these differences, I think the most interesting part of my essay leans heavily on Plato’s insight that political virtues, such as justice and civility, depend for their realization upon the existence of those virtues within individuals.

For the most part, the panelists for the civility forum focused their comments on the political themes of my essay rather than the psychological themes. This strikes me as a helpful and legitimate focus, since the point of the forum was to discuss civility in a political context and since people tend to think of civility as a political virtue rather than a personal one, as a way of treating others rather than a way of treating oneself. Each of the panelists, moreover, offered excellent food for thought about what civility means in a political context, and I’d like to use the rest of this post to offer some brief and friendly responses to their ideas.

Mr. Lennox suggested that the source of incivility is a gap between how we know we should behave and how we actually behave, and he advocated, as a solution to this gap, a principle of non-interference according to which we ought not impose our values upon each other. I agree with Mr. Lennox that there often is a gap of the sort he mentioned. But I think the source of incivility runs deeper. We often do not know how we should behave; the pathways of right and wrong tend to be snarled and jumbled (to use a phrase from Zhuangzi), if only because our society is one in which there are many competing moral ideals and our lives are ones in which we lack any obvious way of discriminating between correct ideals and false ones. Since civility is precisely that virtue that allows us to engage with others in the presence of moral uncertainty, the source of incivility must involve, at least in part, how we react to that uncertainty. For similar reasons, although non-interference is a central value of liberal societies, it is not sufficient as a solution to incivility, since situations in which reacting to moral uncertainty is challenging tend to be ones in which non-interference is not an option. (Paradigm example of what I have in mind here are political policy and law making, which by nature interfere with our behaviors.)

Dr. Jackson suggested that courtesy is the key to promoting civility. I agree that courtesy is a key ingredient of civil behavior, and that lack of courtesy is one way in which incivility manifests itself. However, there are different codes of conduct regarding how to be courteous. Dr. Jackson touted the code of the southern gentleman. But even if this code were able to be developed in a way that does not promote or reinforce unjust or otherwise immoral political structures, there are other codes for how to be courteous, and this diversity among codes makes it likely that there will be some situations in which the codes offer conflicting guidance for how to be courteous. When these situations arise, being courteous is not enough for being civil, especially when behaviors that are courteous according to one code come off as discourteous, and even corrupt, according to another code.

Ms. Romey offered invaluable reports of her on-the-ground experiences with incivility among high school students. Like Mr. Lennox and Dr. Jackson, she raised the question about why our public discourse has become saturated with incivility. The answer I have to offer for her question about why, when compared to the 1960s, we tend to be more uncivil to each other now, is that there is less uniformity and more diversity in public life today than in the 1960s. When the level of consensus about fundamental values and priorities decreases, we should expect the level of incivility to decrease as well, because absence of consensus raises the frequency with which we must engage with those with whom we disagree and thereby raises the opportunities we have to polarize ourselves and attempt to silence or disenfranchise those who advocate competing ideals.

Mr. Stewart emphasized respect as a key ingredient of civility, and he made the excellent point that the basic message of the civil rights movement was not that we ought to be civil toward each other, but instead that we ought to respect each others’ humanity. I agree with all of his comments, and I want to add only that civility involves more than respect: it involves communicating that respect in a sincere way. This was one of the points I tried to make in discussing different ways in which societies might try to be civil societies.

Representing the college student perspective on civility, Ms. Smith offered some helpful insights about what it’s like to be a college student today and the ways in which incivility manifests itself in college classrooms. She also suggested that we should teach civility in all college-level courses, not just special courses devoted to the topic. This strikes me as an excellent idea, especially since civility, like other virtues, is best realized through repeated and habitual practice. But I think more is required. I tried to argue in my essay that if we want people to be civil toward each other, we need to do more than discuss ideas–we need people to be civil to themselves. The next question to ask, of course, is how we can do that. Here I think we need to focus on engaging people bodily rather than just intellectually; we need to create conditions that engage people’s outward performances in ways that prompt internal change, in much the same way that Christians pray or do Stations of the Cross, and Buddhists meditate, in order to alter internal attitudes. One of the audience members at the forum, Mr. Charles McGee, suggested bread and soup luncheons as a way of getting people to engage with those who have different moral perspectives; I encourage my ethics students to perform community service, as a way of gaining exposure to people with whom they would not normally interact. But more work needs to be done here, both in terms of discovering the kinds of practices that promote intrapersonal civility and in terms of getting people to engage in those practices.

*To read Nick Jones’ paper on civility, along with the runner-up and other finalists for the Whetstone-Seaman Faculty Development Award, please visit the Alabama Humanities Review.